The Paradox of Emancipatory Political Theory

There’s a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory that has pretensions of being emancipatory. In a nutshell, the question is that of how this theory can avoid being a sort of commodity. Using Hegel as a model, this contradiction goes something like this: emancipatory political theory says it’s undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x. Yet with rare exceptions, it is only published in academic journals that few have access to, in a jargon that only other academics or the highly literate can understand, and presented only at conferences that only other academics generally attend. Thus, academic emancipatory political theory reveals itself in its truth as something that isn’t aimed at political change or intervention at all, but rather only as a move or moment in the ongoing autopoiesis of academia. That is, it functions as another line on the CV and is one strategy through which the university system carries out its autopoiesis or self-reproduction across time. It thus functions— the issue isn’t here one of the beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function –as something like a commodity within the academic system. The function is not to intervene in the broader political system– despite what all of us doing political theory say and how we think about our work –but rather to carry out yet another iteration of the academic discourse (there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for the autopoiesis of academia in the humanities).

Were the aim political change, then the discourse would have to find a way to reach outside the academy, but this is precisely what academic political theory cannot do due to the publication and presentation structure, publish or perish logic, the CV, and so on. To produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her erudition or scholarship, because they would have to presume an audience that doesn’t have a high falutin intellectual background in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Foucault (who is one of the few that was a breakaway figure), etc. They would also have to adopt a different platform of communication. Why? Because they would have to address an audience beyond the confines of the academy, which means something other than academic presses, conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would say that us Marxists are often the worst of the worst. We engage in a discourse bordering on medieval scholasticism that only schoolmen can appreciate, which presents a fundamental contradiction between the form of their discourse– only other experts can understand it –and the content; they want to produce change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist can’t do either of these things. If they surrender their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the academy (notice the way in which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political theory circles despite the appreciable impact of her work). If they adopt other platforms of communication– and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers sneer at the idea that there’s a necessity to investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse –then they surrender their labor requirements as people working within academia. Both options are foreclosed by the sociological conditions of their discourse.

The paradox of emancipatory academic political discourse is thus that it is formally and functionallyapolitical. At the level of its intention or what it says it aims to effect political change and intervention, but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own discourse and labor conditions without intervening in broader social fields (and no, the classroom doesn’t count). Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be why, in some corners, we’re seeing the execrable call to re-stablish “the party”. The party is the academicfantasy of a philosopher-king or an academic avant gard that simultaneously gets to be an academic and produce political change for all those “dopes and illiterate” that characterize the people (somehow the issue of how the party eventually becomes an end in itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never gets addressed by these neo-totalitarians). The idea of the party and of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of unconscious recognition of the paradox I’ve recognized here and of the political theorist that genuinely wants to produce change while also recognizing that the sociological structure of the academy can’t meet those requirements. Given these reflections, one wishes that the academic that’s learned the rhetoric of politics as an autopoietic strategy for reproducing the university discourse would be a little less pompous and self-righteous, but everyone has to feel important and like their the best thing since sliced bread, I guess.

ASIDE: Autopoiesis refers to the activities a living, conscious, exchange, or information system must engage in to continue its existence from moment to moment. For example, cells must engage in all sorts of processes to continue to exist as cells. A cell is simultaneously that which produces and what is produced. Likewise, capitalist economy must engage in acts of exchange and production at each moment to continue to be that economy. It is both the market that produces itself and the market that is produced through activities of exchange (cf. Althusser on the necessity of reproducing the conditions of production). Academia too, if it is to continue to exist, is simultaneously both that which produces itself and that which is produced. It does this through scholarly work. As an autopoietic system, academia is not concerned with its referent or what its discourse is about, but is a strategy for simply continuing to reproduce itself. This is the article, the production of students that will later become professors and researchers, conference presentations, and so on.

In the humanities, politically inflected discourse has proven to be an extremely effective strategy of autopoiesis (which is why we can wonder whether it’s really political at all). Why? It provides a telos for researchers, giving them meaning to their work (when they’re really just reproducing their own discourse). It provides a strategy for addressing those forces of power that are outside the academic system but which threaten it (administrators, legislators, boards of trusteees, the public) by giving a rationale for their work. In the eyes of administrators, for example, scholarly work on Dante might appear decadent, but if you can persuade them it has vital political importance you might convince them to let you continue your work in reproducing the discourse of your discipline. Finally, it provides an auto-immune system, that defends against that which would prevent autopoietic operations. You can castigate the critic by casting aspersions on their politics (or lack therof), thereby insuring that your kind of work will continue.

But the situation is even worse! Despite its solipsism and the fact that we perpetually end up only addressing one another rather than the broader world, the university discourse has been one of the most effective– if not the most effective –discourse in gathering knowledge of how the social field functions, how oppression is produced, how power functions, and all the rest. We just haven’t yet created a more effective machine for producing this sort of knowledge. Of course, this machine is sadly deficient in applying those critical tools to itself (to see this, amuse yourself one day applying the tools of critical theory to your critical theorist friend and see how he reacts. Apparently everyone else is a dupe and he’s the only one that doesn’t have a discourse structured by dominant sociological relations; narcissistic denial, anyone?). Now Marx, especially in Grundrisse, distinguished between production, distribution, and consumption. He argued that there’s a production of production, a production of distribution, a production of consumption, a distribution of production, a distribution of distribution, a distribution of consumption, and a consumption of production, consumption of distribution, and a consumption of consumption (that last one is fascinating!). Now I’ll tell the story of this baroque grid another day, but what I mean to say here is that the university system has managed to create a system of production (S2 or academic knowledge), a production of itself (the reproduction of the academic system through the production of new academics and the writing of articles (academic commodities) that perpetually reproduce this system, and a production of consumption (academics consuming the work of each other), but it’s done a piss poor job creating a system of distribution (disseminating it’s “knowledge” throughout the broader social world outside the walls of the autopoietic system of academia) and a system of consumption (devising strategies to assist non-academics in integrating those S2’s or knowledge). The academic system is solipsistic, even though it claims to be worldly. The question is how to break the self-enclosed membrane of that solipsistic cell, so that the form and content of theory might be aligned with one another.

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13 Responses to “The Paradox of Emancipatory Political Theory”

I’m not in the academy, but I really want it to exist, exactly in the ridiculous guise you describe. I’m not being sarcastic when I say it’s actually deeply comforting to me that an almost completely useless institution continues to be. If the world were unable to safeguard a useless refuge, then everything would already be useful, and nothing new would happen! I just wish it weren’t so expensive. If it were more affordable to go to college, more people would go, there would be more colleges, and academics would be less protective of their foolishness.

Maybe you mean something more general than the Political Science sub-field called Political Theory but I would say in the world called Political Theory Naomi Klein is widely read, taught, and admired. As are many other public intellectual/theorist like Mike Davis etc. Leading Political Theorists who actually have their degrees in Political Theory are people like Cornel West, Bill Connolly, Rom Coles, Bonnie Honig, Nancy Fraser, Michael Shapiro, Kathy Ferguson, Bernard Harcourt, Wendy Brown, and others. All of whom maintain an active involvement in politics at many different levels including the kind of popular media commentary of people like Klein. I think amongst these folks erudition counts substantially less than what you can do with your thinking. Harcourt’s editorial in The Guardian during Occupy was pretty impressive, I think, at bridging theory and the formation of something like a new counter-public much in the way that Graeber and others have worked hard to do. Despite West’s failed hip-hop album I think his efforts as an engaged scholar have been pretty impressive particular in his ability to maintain left pressure on Obama in ways not easily coopted by the racist Right. It seems like most of the people you are identifying as ‘Academic Political Theorists” are philosophers, literary critics, and humanities/humanists of various sorts. Political Theorist many current Political Theorists like West were students of Sheldon Wolin and others who were at the forefront of actions against the Vietnam War and later Apartheid and other counter-neoliberal struggles even if not Marxist struggles. So maybe labels are somewhat useful in this case as I think there is a long tradition of political Political Theory that is quite interested in many different forms of political intervention and many tactics of communication. In particular, Bruce Robbins film project Some of My Best Friends are Zionists or Judith Butler’s full on assault against the taboo of publicly criticizing the state of Israel. http://www.youtube.com/user/bestfriendsfilm
There are plenty of useless Political Theorists and in the case of some Straussians dangerous Political Theorists but I am not sure more than the other vast oceans of mediocrity that flood every field from Physics to Romance Languages.

Also Deleuze’s editorials against the first Gulf War were excellent and written for a very broad audience as were his public critiques of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Also Guattari helped raise the profile of issues like global warming in both popular and institutional politics. The Three Ecologies was written for a broad audience and got the attention of the French government. Also in Adorno’s case his sociological work was very straight forward and readable although very boring. I have no defense of Lacan as being engaged just intelligent and provocative.

Right, this will be true of any academic subject because academia is an autopoietic system and must therefore reproduce itself through its own operations. Moreover, as such a system it is operationally closed. It doesn’t get outside itself and only communicates with itself. The difference in the case of so much political theory is you get this form/content contradiction between what it is actually doing and what it claims to aim to be doing. There are, of course, exceptions like the ones you cite, where the form/content paradox is overcome. The issue is one of how to do more of that.

What’s even sadder is not the idea of political theory being ingrown, boxed into a peer review system that is controlled by a few academic experts. No, this is grist for the usual mill. What is more damaging is the commodification of experts and elites themselves, the whole idea of the Academy as some special institution, a capitalist center for the commodification of individuals themselves. Think of the PhD circuit itself: you spend anywhere between 50k and 150k depending on the institution, grants, etc. to gain such certificates, then your bound to the very system that you may want to philosophize about, and emancipate people from… what’s the point? Why do we bestow this special exception on elite academics, as if all that study and years of work made them exceptions, special experts in some field of knowledge. Is this not another of the illusions we’ve created? Isn’t this one of the ideological constructs we’ve all excepted to begin with, a belief in special people with special knowledge who supposedly are there to teach us lesser creatures the truth of it? It seems to me the whole system is a commodity cycle built on exclusionary practices that benefits only those who have the social and economic power. Unless you’re rich are have a boat-load of grants etc. you have a difficult time getting that final degree, and even then you begin a new process of trying to compete with a myriad of other creatures to gain a foothold either in that system, or fall back into the real world competing in areas that may have nothing to do with one’s academic predilections.

It seems you’re crying about spilt milk when a fire is raging all around you, Levi.

I think a lot of us academics advocate something that could be called “trickle down theory”. We tell ourselves that these things filter out into the broader world through the classroom. There’s some limited truth to that. Here, however, is the problem as I see it. First, a lot of that theorization doesn’t really trickle down because at the undergraduate level and even the upper undergraduate level, the material often just isn’t that advanced. This is a functional constraint on teaching. You can’t run a program without the right operating system. Pedagogically the educator is forced to reinforce standard narratives and simplify to teach at all, e.g., we all know that the narrative of the empiricist/rationalist debate of the 17th and 18th century is a bs simplification, but we still often teach it because it’s a convenient sorting device for students that haven’t yet gained expertise in the field.

At the graduate and upper undergraduate level, the situation is a bit different. There the function of the university is to reproduce itsef. Part of the reproduction of the university consists in producing new professors and researchers. Just as our bodies need to perpetually produce new cells to replace the ones that have died, universities have to perpetually produce new educators and research to continue existing. In this regard, the critical work doesn’t really get out of the halls of the academic system at all. Rather, they’re just instances of the autopoiesis of that system. I really need to write an intro to sociological autopoietic theory because it’s hard to get all this stuff or understand it without that theoretical framework.

man any actual movement out of the fly-bottle of the academic hothouses would be welcomed, just look at the good folks over @ newapps bright overeducated and often progressive in their political identifications but while they can summon endless ammo for to and fros over the minutia of their research interests/disciplines they come up with nada in terms of actually resisting the Borgification of their work lives:http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/05/can-academics-organize-around-attacks-on-academia.html

“You can’t run a program without the right operating system. Pedagogically the educator is forced to reinforce standard narratives and simplify to teach at all.”

I would be more reserved in characterizing this as a totalizing project. Certainly with the right topic areas and the right subjects, you can displace the role of the university’s autopoesies. Specifically, I’m thinking here of social movement oriented courses, which integrate community service elements of learning. I was on a panel a few years back with other academics across the social sciences who had instituted community service learning to displace the reproduction of undergraduate students as passive learners of expertise thought. CSL normally involves some form of written reflection on the experience which may or may not overlap with course content. I try to reinforce the autonomy of the process against course content.

There are of course a range of negative consequences of this, as the primary effort behind CSL is ‘ real world experience’ which normally means neoliberalsing academic practice, job oriented education, etc. But on the whole I think there are ways to go about the University that aren’t just about the University.

As someone who enjoys the bodily politics of engaged political sites, I don’t think a political education (for example) can be developed from within the University discourse. Great insights as always!

I think that in modern times university don’t loses its hegemony to produce Knowledge because

1- its integrated into market relations and also creates value and includes valorization procces

2 – its is still has a function of division of labour . if in times of fordist economies it was working distinctive logic of inside outside and was not socialised as now. (inside -intellectual, hight skilled labour, and outside manual labour ) . it was not productive but rather functional to the productive system . under post-industrial condition university on the basis of a differential inclusion , which means creating hierarchy between knowledges according of market logic within inclusion